About Me

I am Salty The Beast. I am what you might call a Renaissance man, meaning I find interest in most every medium. I love watching movies, listening to music, writing music, playing video games, making videos, etc.

Sunday, August 19, 2012

MOVIE REVIEW: ParaNorman

Zombies have seen such an astonishing resurgence in the
popular conscience over the past few years that it’s a little bit frightening.
The undead have been in entertainment for a long time now (see George A.
Romero’s “Night Of The Living Dead” and my personal favorite, “Dawn Of The
Dead”), but nowadays you can’t hop from one artistic medium to the next without
breathing in the pungent aroma of zombie influence. Spanning comics, video
games, literature, TV, and now music (Jonathan Coulton’s “Re: Your Brains”),
zombies leave no stone unturned as long as said stone has artistic integrity.

I don’t really get it myself. I never bought into these
creatures as inescapable forces of nature and I’m not quite sure how they could
usher in a global apocalypse. With certain exceptions such as “28 Days Later”
that toy with zombie lore and create something new, most zombies we see now are
still the lumbering numbskulls from Romero’s movies that feast on human flesh
and can be exterminated by inflicting major damage on their skulls. This is not
a criticism of zombie apocalypse or zombie survival films in general, but these
antagonists are just…sorta silly. Any creature that can be completely stopped
in its path by a vinyl record to the noggin isn’t very intimidating in my book.

Thus, I was tickled by the opening sequence of
“ParaNorman,” which presents a parody of one of those schlocky zombie flicks
straight out of the grindhouse cinema bargain bin (the “Feature Presentation”
title card is a nice nostalgic touch). The pursued female in the fictional
exploitation film spends a lot more time shrieking in place than she does
evading the threat.

But “ParaNorman” has nothing but kindness and respect toward
horror audiences of all ages. Its protagonist Norman Babcock (Kodi Smit-McPhee)
finds consolation in the glow of his television set, allowing the images of
scary movies to enchant his young eyes. He gets it. His grandmother, not so
much. “Why are they eating people?” she asks, puzzled by conventional zombie
behavior, to which Norman replies, “That’s just what they do.” Earlier this
year, a similar discussion about horror movies took place between my
grandparents and I. Needless to say, both sides came out of the argument
continuing to regard their opinion as the correct one.

Norman has a special ability: he sees dead people, just like
Haley Joel Osment in “The Sixth Sense.” Though while Osment’s condition was
like a curse that haunted him constantly, you’d be hard-pressed to call this
power a ‘curse’ in Norman’s possession. He’s come to terms with it, and he’s
seen interacting with all sorts of benign spirits on his daily walk to school.

If anything, his condition is more of a curse on his social
life than it is on his psychological welfare. His odd behavior, scrawny
appearance, and insistence toward having a supernatural ability makes him a
likely candidate for harassment and ostracizing by his schoolmates, especially
the local bully Alvin (Christopher Mintz-Plasse, pulling a departure from
typecasting similar to Anthony Michael Hall in “Edward Scissorhands”). The only
kindred spirit available within shouting distance for Norman is Neil (TuckerAlbrizzi), a fellow outcast who is constantly picked on for being fat.

The setting is a small town in New England called Blithe
Hollow, which is clearly modeled after Salem, Massachusetts, and even inherits
the town’s association with witch trials in the colonial era. 300 years after
townspeople executed a young girl thought to be a witch, people claim that a
curse is still buried deep within Blithe Hollow’s history. Norman’s
newly-deceased uncle (John Goodman) informs him of a special ritual that must
be performed in order to ensure that the full extent of the witch’s curse never
sees the light of day. Norman is also imparted with the responsibility of
finishing this practice before sunrise of the following day.

Most animated films these days focus their eyes towards
frenetic action and rapid pacing, but “ParaNorman” is quite an anomaly. For one,
the animation style is stop-motion as opposed to the computer-based methods in
which Dreamworks and Pixar specialize. What’s more is that it is the first film
of its kind to employ a 3D color printer to make character faces and
expressions. The technology brings an exquisite new articulacy to the art form.
The facial features on every individual character are nearly flawless, endowing
them with an unprecedented amount of subtlety, humanity, and realism (despite
still retaining a cartoonish aesthetic).

And the best part is that the filmmakers know about the
concept of restraint. Most of “ParaNorman” consists of building mood and
atmosphere and dealing rather seriously with issues of wrongful condemnation
and the natural instinct of humans to criticize that which is different. The
film’s biggest asset is that it knows when to scare and when to hold back.
Well, I thought the second act, a big zombie chase across town, went on
entirely too long. But I suppose it’s a trade-off for the third act when we
learn that even zombies, the single most vacant antagonistic beings in all of
horror, can have personalities themselves, as well as deep, deep regrets.